Philpax

Relatively brief notes on the experience of learning Swedish and Japanese simultaneously, and how I'm managing.

Why?

I've had a lifelong interest in learning Japanese. The first and foremost reason is that I'm a weeb - but honestly, it's genuinely just an interesting language with a great deal of associated, equally interesting culture. I started making a serious effort to learn it towards the tail end of 2019, but despite the surfeit of free time the pandemic offered me, I ended up dropping it. In recent years, I've been trying to restart the learning process with moderate success.

Simultaneously, I moved to Sweden about four years ago. For the first few years, I got by entirely on English. Ostensibly, one can continue to do this indefinitely, but there are two problems: one, you're not really integrating if you move somewhere and make no effort to learn the language, and two, there are aspects of Swedish culture - including making Swedish friends - that you will never encounter without making an effort to learn the language. So, over the last two years, I have been slowly studying the language, and have recently ramped up my efforts this year.

So, I'm learning Swedish for matters of practicality, and I'm learning Japanese for matters of enjoyment. This is not necessarily the most efficient process; there will be interference/crosstalk between the languages, and you would almost certainly learn the languages faster by learning in series instead of parallel, but I want to be able to function (not necessarily be fluent!) in both languages within a similar timeframe.

That is to say, my goals are relatively simple: I want to be able to function in Swedish society - including hanging out with Swedish folks - while minimising the number of times I drop back to English, and I want to be able to visit Japan again and get around, and hopefully have interesting conversations along the way.

Things to watch out for

Learning two languages at the same time is non-trivial, especially ones that are relatively linguistically distant from each other, and especially while you still have to maintain a command of your primary language. I'm still trying to figure out what the impact of doing this is long-term; I haven't seen it through for long-enough sprints to understand what it will do to my ability to parse and manipulate language.

With that being said, the most obvious impact is that you will constantly mix up words and grammar from your various languages, especially if you're studying them in close proximity to each other. While practicing my language production for Swedish, I have frequently inserted words from Japanese, because that's the language I'm putting heavier "study weight" on.

Speaking of "study weight": the linguistic distance is a factor here, too. I've chosen to allocate more of my study time to Japanese because it requires much more of a lift to parse for an English speaker over Swedish. Both Swedish and English are Germanic languages and share some degree of grammar and vocabulary, which means that it takes much less of a paradigm shift to understand and produce Swedish. Not to say that you will necessarily do that well - I certainly don't - but you have a common base from which to work with.

Japanese is much different in this regard; obviously, the writing system is radically different and requires a significant amount of upfront study, but that's just mere memorisation. The thing that'll get you is the grammar: it is fundamentally different to how sentences are constructed in most Western languages, and will require you to more actively rewire your own linguistic circuits. Due to this, my Swedish and Japanese studies do not get an equal amount of study, but I feel like I'm progressing at around the same rate in both.

However, you should be careful to not be lured in by false friends. Just because something sounds similar to English - in both Swedish and Japanese! - does not mean it means the same thing, or functions in the same way. Japanese even has a term for English-derived words that are divorced from their original meaning: wasai-eigo. This is stating the obvious to some degree: this is common to every language's borrowed words - but it's still something to watch out for, especially in Japanese.

Of course, it goes without saying that studying two languages at the same time is both time- and effort-intensive. There is no way to get around this; your only alternative is to stretch out the process to such a length that you are likely to be losing more information per day than you retain. I spend at least an hour per day studying, and that number will readily grow when I study from a textbook/media.

The final thing I'll mention for now is pitch accent. Both Swedish and Japanese have it.¹Well, to be exact, Swedish has tonal accent. It's not quite the same thing, but the same nuance of having to capture changes in pitch remains. I am making a mild effort to try to match how native speakers pitch their words, but I'm also not trying that hard. This is probably a mistake on my part: everything I've seen suggests that one should try to integrate pitch accent into your learning process as soon as possible, to ensure you don't learn bad habits, but it's just not that much of a focus for me.

General thoughts

Studying from textbooks and grinding vocabulary / grammar points will unlock a language for you, but I'm led to believe there's a fundamental limit to how good your command of the language will be. Ultimately, language is used as a tool for communication between people (and, as we get further into this weird future, other types of entities), which means it's important to be able to understand and speak like a native would.

My general strategy here is to bootstrap a working command of the language, and then transition my study towards immersion. There are plenty of options here: reading works written in the language, translating (or writing original work!) my own work to the language, watching media in the language, or having conversations with natives in the language. That last one has been historically quite difficult for language learners, but it's significantly easier with the internet.

Today, I'm doing this with sentence decks in Anki (which force you to learn how the language is actually used in the wild), and by occasionally consuming comprehensible input. I wish I'd started on the sentence decks earlier: they hurt at first, because you will start to actually test the limits of your comprehension, but it will rapidly get better - and with it, your ability to work with the language.

Anyway, it's simple: at some point in the future, I am going to join a Japanese VRChat instance and do my best to survive. I don't know when, but I will.

Software

Anki

Anki. Anki anki anki. The best free spaced repetition system out there. SRS is one of the most efficient ways to memorise, and you're going to need to do a lot of memorisation. I suggest these addons for Anki-on-desktop:

• Audio Playback Controls: Being able to slow down audio cards is crucial to being able to improve your pronunciation and/or recognition. Just make sure to eventually work your way up to normal speed.
• Review Heatmap: I must admit that I find streaks, and visualisations thereof, to be quite motivating. Seeing your progress day-in day-out can help contextualise just how much grinding you're doing, which I find useful on days where I feel like I'm not achieving much at all.
• Adjust Sound Volume: There are decks out there that are useful, but have their audio levels way out of whack. You can use this addon to normalise them and/or bring them to a volume you find acceptable.

LLMs

Your favourite LLM; mine is Claude, but any reasonably-powerful LLM will do. They can break down sentences for you and clarify grammar points that are not immediately intuitive.

As with any LLM guidance, you'll want to check the results for yourself (I cross-reference against the grammar dictionaries, mentioned later), but they're very powerful and the closest thing you can get to a teacher-on-demand. Here's an example of a conversation where I explore some Japanese sentences.

Environment

This is another thing that seems obvious, but is something I failed to do until relatively recently: set up an environment for yourself to study in, free of distractions. There's nothing more counterproductive to getting through your study than being pinged on Discord every few minutes, or tabbing over to your favourite social media, or otherwise finding a way to liberate your focus from the task at hand.

I took this a bit further than most: I set up a separate desk, and then reconfigured an old computer I had lying around into the perfect study machine. That computer has my study material and access to a browser with no logged-in sessions. This adds friction to the very act of procrastinating.

The impact of this is real: when I sit down at that desk, I am ready to study, and I will study until I am out of study power or have something else to do. Attaching a mental frame-of-mind to a physical location is a pretty common trick, but it's common for a reason: it works.

Habit-forming

You'll need to develop a habit for studying your languages every day, and catching up when you don't. Personally, I have a daily diary in Obsidian with checklists for things I could do/work on for each day; I make sure that the checkboxes for my daily language study are checked off at the end of each day, and attempt to work on the less-daily stuff at least once a week.

Swedish resources

I started with Duolingo, which was a waste of time that I cannot recommend. You will not learn the language: you will learn to parrot phrases that it presents to you, you will constantly cheat yourself in the interest of keeping your metrics up, and you will drive yourself mad with all of the incredibly irritating gamification. The only useful thing it's given me is an Anki deck to study, but there are almost certainly better options for that.

Anyhow, I can recommend Babbel. It requires upfront payment, but the courses are actually course-shaped: they teach you grammar points, pronunciation notes, things to watch out for, etc. Unlike Duolingo, you do not have to infer the language's characteristics from staring at contextless sentences: you are directly taught how the language works, and then taken through dialogues that model the points in discussion. Some of those dialogues are presented at a level higher than your own, so you benefit from passive immersion. And, of course, it doesn't have the insane gamification!

I use these Anki decks:

• Duolingo Swedish: as mentioned above. Well-formulated, but there are probably more appropriate decks you can use if you're not using Duolingo. I'm continuing to use this because I've already started, and it's genuinely quite useful for the essentials.
• Your First 625 Words in Swedish - Part 1 (updated): Useful, diverse Swedish sentences and words pronounced by a native Swedish speaker. The only complaints I have are that the audio is a bit too quiet (but Adjust Sound Volume fixes that), and some of the pop culture references are a bit dated, but in terms of value, this deck can't be beat.

Japanese resources

I'm self-studying with the Genki textbooks and doing kanji/vocabulary with WaniKani. Both are worth the money: the former is a solid course through the fundamentals, and the latter offers an integrated, engaging experience that will teach you how to actually type (which makes it great IME practice).

I supplement these with comprehensible input; there are quite a few YouTube channels you can use for this.

For getting hiragana/katakana down, I initially used these decks:

• Japanese Hiragana
• Katakana with stroke diagrams and audio

but you'll only need these for a few weeks, and there are other choices available. This is the first thing people hit when learning Japanese, so there are so, so many choices.

Today, I use these Anki decks:

• a Genki deck that is no longer available, but that's fine - there's no shortage of decks. Pick the one that looks the most well-attended.
• 4,217 Japanese Sentences w/ Audio (& Lessons!): responsible for dramatically improving my Japanese comprehension. Real sentences, with real speakers, and with real breakdowns. Excellent deck.

For reference material, I use:

• jisho.org: online Japanese-English dictionary with fuzzy lookup, pronunciations, example sentences, and more
• Shirabe Jisho: iOS app for the same
• A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar + Intermediate/Advanced: a physical dictionary of Japanese grammar points (particles, inflections, subphrases, etc). Online resources also work, but a physical book is easy to rifle through and is less distracting.